Charlestown Patriot-Bridge

Press Release for Carolyn's Book Launch on January 30

November 15, 2013

King Bird Productions

ï¿¼ï¿¼King Bird Productions
Press Contact:
Kristine Walker, King Bird Productions kwalker@KingBirdProductions.com
Inspiring Stories of Music, Family and Black Womanhood
For Immediate Release:
They Raised Me Up
A Black Single Mother and the Women Who Inspired Her by Carolyn Marie Wilkins
Meet the Author and Book Launch
Berklee College of Music Bookstore, Thursday, January 30th, 2014 at 7pm
"An intriguing and beautifully rendered look at a group of women that is often overlooked.â€
-Diane Harriford, Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies and Women's Studies, Vassar College
Kingbird Productions is pleased to announce the release of They Raised Me Up, the story of single mother Carolyn Wilkinsâ€™ battle to succeed in the manâ€™s world of jam sessions and jazz clubs, and of the five musically gifted black women who inspired her. In sync with the release, Wilkins will be signing books and reading excerpts from They Raised Me Up at Bostonâ€™s Berklee College of Music Bookstore (1090 Boylston Street, Boston MA) on Thursday, January 30th, 2014 at 7:00 p.m. Free and open to the public. Berklee College of Music Bookstore (617.747.2402) is wheelchair accessible. For additional information visit: www.carolynwilkins.com
!Wilkins alternates her own story with those of her ancestorsâ€™ struggles to realize their own dreams: Phillipa Schuyler, whose efforts to â€œpassâ€ for white inspired Carolyn to embrace her own black identity; Marjory Jackson, the musician and single mother whose dark complexion and flamboyant lifestyle always raised eyebrows; Lilly Pruett, the stunningly beautiful daughter of an illiterate sharecropper; and Ruth Lipscomb, the country girl who realized her dream of becoming a concert pianist.
!They Raised Me Up interweaves memoir with family history to create an entertaining, informative, and engrossing read that will appeal to anyone with an interest in African American or womenâ€™s history or to readers simply looking for an intriguing story about music and family.
!About the Author: Carolyn Marie Wilkins is a Professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. She has toured South America as a Jazz Ambassador for the U.S. State Department, performed on radio and television with her group SpiritJazz, and worked as a percussionist for the Pittsburgh and Singapore symphonies. She has released several critically acclaimed CDs of her original compositions and is the author of Tips for Singers: Performing, Auditioning, and Rehearsing (Berklee Press) and Damn Near White: An African American Familyâ€™s Rise from Slavery to Bittersweet Success (University of Missouri Press).
!Carolyn Wilkins is available for interviews and appearances. For booking presentations, media appearances, interviews, and/or book signings contact Kristine Walker at King Bird Productions.
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For full bio and additional info: www.carolynwilkins.com
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The pianist and bandleader Sun Ra — who claimed Saturn as his planet of origin, referred to his ideas as “equations,” and led a long-running Arkestra that performed from the 1960s onward in ancient-Egypt-meets-outer-space regalia, sometimes with dancers or carnival performers on hand — was, to the general public, an odd, cryptic character.

To saxophonist Danny Ray Thompson, who joined the Arkestra in 1968, the same year that Ra moved the band to Philadelphia — it had first formed in Chicago in the 1950s, and moved to New York after that — Ra was something else altogether: a musical prodigy with 2/15/14 1:30 PM extraordinary breadth of knowledge, creative genius, and professional dedication.

Of course, Ra’s self-presentation and that of his group were not just for the sake of being outlandish. The outer-space theories, references to ancient Egypt, and wild outfits and staging were consistent with a musical approach that reveled in both the tradition — gospel, the blues — and in radical ideas of artistic and also political freedom.

Ra was as suspicious of movement leftism and professional activists as he was of the power structure, as his interviews and the hilarious and sharp 1974 cult film “Space Is the Place” make clear. His work instead inspired Afrofuturism, the artistic movement that employs science-fiction to imagine scenarios of black, and human, liberation.

“When you went to hear him in concert you suspected there were deep waters there, deep information,” says Clark, who saw the Arkestra around town in Philadelphia in the 1970s. “Lately we have this phrase, ‘respectability politics.’ He didn’t care about that. He blew it out of the water.”

One major Ra friend and supporter was Amiri Baraka, the African-American writer and intellectual who died last month. Baraka was present at Berklee in 2010 for another Ra-related event, when the archived papers of the late saxophonist Pat Patrick — a close Sun Ra collaborator dating back to the 1950s, and the father of Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick — were given to the college.

Baraka attended the first major Sun Ra centenary tribute, a performance by the Arkestra at New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center last October, and was slated to attend the upcoming Berklee show as well.

It was he who arranged for the three Arkestra veterans — Thompson, Charles Davis, and Arkestra leader Marshall Allen (who turns 90 this year and is going strong) — to sit in with the faculty band.

“We weren’t going to refuse Amiri,” Thompson says.

In the Arkestra tradition, both Thompson and Berklee’s Clark say they and their colleagues intend to dress for the occasion — and in fact, Clark says, audience members are encouraged to do the same. Formal wear, Egyptian head-dresses, beads, science-fiction and robotic gear are all welcome, though of course optional.

“It’ll be just like a Sun Ra concert,” Thompson says. “It’s a special occasion.”

Posted by admin on April 18, 2014 in Books, Events, Music · 0 Comments

An Ulster Publishing publication

It’s good to have role models. And it’s good to pay tribute to them, once you’ve reached a level of mastery that reflects well on their contributions to you. In her memoir They Raised Me Up, Carolyn Wilkins does just that. With dignified prose, she honors the women in her family’s history, women who came before and who surmounted their own challenging life conditions to realize their own dreams.

A successful jazz musician and scholar, Wilkins is a professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. She has toured South America as jazz ambassador for the US State Department, performed on radio and television with her group SpiritJazz and worked as a percussionist for the Pittsburgh and Singapore Symphonies. She has recorded several critically acclaimed CDs of original compositions and is the author of Tips for Singers: Performing, Auditioning and Rehearsing and Damn Near White: An African American Family’s Rise from Slavery to Bittersweet Success. Wilkins will read from her new book at the Vassar Alumnae House at 161 College Avenue in Poughkeepsie on Monday, April 21 at 5 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Wilkins left an unhappy marriage in Tacoma in the 1980s and moved with her preschool-aged daughter to a working-class town outside of Boston, where she hoped to make her way in the music business as a jazz pianist. Surviving in a man’s world while raising a child on her own pushed her right up against the inequities that African American women face in every field. She had already

been rejected from a pursuit in classical music, because black females were not welcome in that realm at the time. In the jazz world of clubs and bars, she encountered sexual predation – enough to make her wonder if her choice had been a wise one. But there were bills to pay and babysitters to retain. So, in spite of almost-crippling stage fright, she forced herself to sit down with jazzmen and play.

Wilkins credits her ancestors and mentors with her success. As her role models, Wilkins counts five musically gifted women who struggled to achieve their passions at the turn of the 20th century: Philippa Schuyler, whose efforts to pass for white inspired Carolyn to embrace her own black identity despite her “damn near white” appearance; Marjory Jackson, the musician and single mother whose dark complexion and flamboyant lifestyle raised eyebrows among her contemporaries in the snobby, color-conscious world of the African American elite; Lilly Pruett, the daughter of an illiterate sharecropper whose stunning beauty might have been her only ticket out of the South; Ruth Lipscomb, the country girl who dreamed of becoming a concert pianist and realized her improbable ambition in 1941; and Wilkins’ grandmother, Alberta Sweeney, who survived personal tragedy by relying on the musical talent and spiritual stamina that she had acquired growing up in a Kansas mining town.

Her story interweaves memories of those first difficult years in Boston with tales of these five women. She references some of the historical situations in which they found themselves, like her grandmother and great-grandmother’s arrival in the Wild West town of Weir, Kansas, where Negroes were being enticed away from Birmingham and all over the South to work the coal mines.

Some of Wilkins’ mentors quietly persevered against the odds. Others were more outspoken, like a great-aunt who worked to register black voters in the 1940s and put African American candidates in office. Some credit her efforts, along with a strong caucus of churchgoing women, for putting Harry Truman in the White House in 1948.

Reflecting the persistent strength of the women themselves, and more famous icons of civil rights too, Wilkins’ memoir presents slices of African American and women’s history with dignity and integrity. They Raised Me Up is an entertaining, informative and engrossing read.